With very little initial work, physical media is also very convenient.

I buy a disk, put it into a specific drive, get a instant message when its ripped, check its name and put it into a folder. From there my mediabox converts it to a managable size and adds it to the collection.

Whin I turn on my TV I see all these Movies and shows neatly presented by Kodi. I have a tiny Wireless keyboard and can start any in under a second. No buffering, no adds, no matter if the router is connected, and no fear of ever loosing access.

Its great.

Exeptions are there of couse, I would love to buy The Orville, but they just don’t want my money!

Because somebody has to create that media. And that person they have to live. (Or better that huge team when it comes to movies) So they have to earn money, so somebody has to pay them.

I also enjoy that today I can test if something fits me If I am skeptical. But I also always make sure to pay back creators for things I enjoy so that in the future there will be more things I enjoy.

Of course I understand anybody who can not afford media and am happy to subsidize them with the part I am paying for good shows. But if you have a Plex server, you can afford it. And If you say its close just start with things you like most and at least say “thank you” to them.

But in the details this attack is not that bad. E.g. NordVPN and I guess also other VPNs use firewall rules to drop traffic on normal network interfaces.

Their side channel is still routing traffic away from the VPN channel. Then they can observe that there is no traffic and guess that the user either didn’t make requests in that moment or that he wanted to visit a website in the range covered by the route. They can not spy on the traffic.

Also you can not quickly move into a network and apply this attack, as DHCP leases usually last 1 day or at least 1 hour. Only when they expire you can apply the attack (or you force the user to drop from the network, which is easy if they are using WPA2, but only possible by blocking the wifi signal if they are using WPA3)

It is a serious issue and should be mitigated, but not as huge as news articles make it.

I am a sysadmin and believe me when I say that happens. Mostly due to updates. Within that updates that just plainly break things. E.g. deleting the users files. Or other updates which only break some PCs. (those are fun to diagnose) E.g. if the recovery partiton created by its own installer is suddenly to small. and I also had it more than a few times that Windows pulled in a driver “update” which broke things. One time it even tried to apply the wrong driver! I have now disabled all driver updates trough windows on all PCs I manage. Rarely PCs also just suddenly refuse to boot, being caught in a recovery loop. After trying two times for hours to find the reason and only one success I don’t care anymore and just restore a working backup in that case. Mind that (nearly) all users do not have admin rights.

On Linux? I had it that release upgrades broke things, but only once several years ago on the PCs where I wait till the official release is made. On my own ones I am often to feature hungry to wait until after the beta, and I know I can fix things. I had one 12 year old PC where X11+KDE got unstable after a release upgrade, thankfully a switch to Wayland solved this. Besides that? Never had any issue I didn’t cause myself and never had a running system which suddenly broke. Granted I do not administer as many Linux PCs as Windows ones. But there are a few, some of them also in the hands of users.